A strange but thrilling mix of Planet Earth and Ski Sunday
The jagged spine of the Rocky Mountains bisects North America, a windblasted wilderness that’s a refuge for mountain lions, bison, elk – and Lycra-clad lunatics in base-jumping suits. The opening episode of Mountain: Life at the Extreme, BBC Two’s new three-part documentary series, paid testimony to a broad sweep of animal life and human high jinks.
If you think of the Rockies, you probably think of swish ski resorts like Aspen or Banff. The reality is much wilder, as the illuminating narration by the actor Douglas Henshall made clear. The Rockies are 3,000 miles long, with so many peaks that many remain unnamed. It is a place of extreme weather: burnt by wildfires in summer, buried in snowdrifts in winter, and clocking up the world’s biggest recorded temperature swing of 56 degrees C (132 degrees Fahrenheit) in a single day.
All of this made for a visual smorgasbord, with the camera lingering on lush footage of an icebound lake cracking in spring or the Gothic beauty of an iron-hard deer carcass in the snow. Every sight and sound was infused with the drama of life in a hostile environment. We heard the wince-inducing thump of mighty rams locking horns, and the rasp of an elk’s tongue on her newborn, who you prayed wouldn’t end up as a midnight snack for a wandering grizzly bear.
The programme itself was something of an unusual beast, it felt like the love-child of Planet Earth and Ski Sunday. It mixed superb wildlife footage with the stories of people who live and play in the Rockies. Notable among these was Jeff Shapiro, who climbed a 3,000-metre-high cliff then jumped off it in a wingsuit, a scrap of fabric that billowed between his limbs and turned him into a giant man-bat. The sickening crumble of stones as his feet pushed away from the edge made me cling to the sofa with a sense of vertigo. There were more high-octane thrills as we followed an extreme skier down an avalanche-prone couloir, feeling the slip of snow beneath her feet.
It felt a little jarring to go from adrenalin sports to gazing at deer, but at least the wildlife was generally of the lively variety. Particularly impressive was rare footage of a mountain lion. With eyes shining like coins and a tale as thick as a draft excluder, you could see why some native tribes saw this ancient predator as a spirit from the underworld.
After this picturesque homage to North America’s great mountain range, the next two episodes will tackle the Andes and the Himalayas. They promise to be an exhilarating trip for all armchair Alpine enthusiasts.
From the world’s wildest places to its most crowded ones: BBC Two began its new World’s Busiest documentary series with a sojourn in Hong Kong. This was salutary viewing for anyone who has ever groused about commuting on a packed tube train from a poky flat: Asia’s trading hub is the most cramped place on Earth, with 42,000 people squeezed into every square mile. The natural deep-water harbour is hemmed in by mountains, forcing its inhabitants to build upwards rather than sprawl out.
With his usual genial enthusiasm, the historian Dan Snow hoved into view on a container ship to deliver an extremely brief history of the city, from its debut as a free port in 1860 to its role today as a linchpin of global capitalism. The silk trade, the opium wars and the 1997 handover from the British to China were dispatched in around 10 seconds each, before the programme zipped off to explore present-day life in the world’s priciest sardine tin.
Fellow presenters Anita Rani and Ade Adepitan covered everything from a curious devil-banishing ritual carried out under a crowded flyover to the obligatory squeezing of exotic fruit in the market place and a trip to the races. Adepitan also met a middle-class family living in a high-rise apartment who had found an ingenious solution to the lack of privacy: space-age sleeping pods that added two extra bedrooms to the front room. Less fortunate was a labourer who spent £180 a month to rent a cubbyhole that made a prison cell look airy and well-equipped.
Overall, this was a vivid glimpse of the opportunity and inequality that sit cheek-by-jowl in the seething crowds. Its one flaw was its frenetic pace, with the three presenters covering subjects that could each have easily commanded more time. A little like Hong Kong itself, it just tried to cram too much in.